When a $4 million nonprofit hit a major roadblock with their Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central implementation, it was clear something had gone wrong. Business Central couldn’t handle the nonprofit’s complex fund balancing needs out of the box, and the intercompany add-on recommended by their Dynamics Partner was a good tool but turned out to be the wrong fit for their specific industry requirements.
With the go-live date approaching, the project was at a standstill. Enter Jay Malik and his team from .
Nonprofit-Specific Features
In this video, Jay explains how Tangicloud partnered with the Dynamics 365 Business Central Partner to implement the app, and activate nonprofit-specific features like grant tracking and audit-ready reports to get the project back on track.
If you’re a nonprofit organization or a Dynamics Partner that works with nonprofits or government agencies, this is a must-watch.
Watch the full video below to see how Tangicloud turned this fail into a fix and Jay’s advice based on 27+ years or experience.
The FAIL
- $4M nonprofit hit a roadblock with Business Central.
- Wrong intercompany add-on chosen for nonprofit needs.
- Not able to handle fund balancing and reporting.
- Implementation stalled before go-live.
The FIX
- Implemented Tangicloud Fundamentals for nonprofits.
- Activated nonprofit-specific features like fund and grant tracking.
- Delivered audit-ready reports quickly and cost-effectively.
- Collaborated with the Dynamics Partner to rescue the project.
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Transcript:
Anya Ciecierski, ERP Software Blog:
This is One Fail, One Fix with Jay Malik from Tangicloud. We're talking about a nonprofit organization with $4 million in revenue and nine users, and they were in the middle of a Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central implementation when they hit a major roadblock. They quickly realized that BC just wasn't set up to handle their complex fund balancing needs.
And the intercompany add-on that their Dynamics Partner told them would do the trick, well, it turned out it really did not do what they needed. A good product, but not for their industry.
They needed to manage multiple funds, track grant-specific budgets and compliance, and generate nonprofit financial reports. But choosing the wrong add-on for Business Central led to a pretty big fail for them. Jay, how did this happen?
Jay Malik, Tangicloud Technologies:
We know that Business Central is the number one middle market ERP application in the world, the most successful cloud product from Microsoft. The challenge that creates is there's literally thousands of add-ons that have been built by Partners across the world, ISVs, and it is very difficult for customers and Partners to wade through all that noise.
So it's not unnatural for a Partner, especially with the wave of GP customers moving onto Business Central online, to go look at AppSource, the marketplace from Microsoft, pick something that sounds good, feels good, and run through the implementation. And sometimes, it's just easy to make the wrong choice.
So the richness and diversity of the solutions out there also makes it harder for Partners and customers to actually find the right solutions to fit a customer's requirements.
Anya Ciecierski, ERP Software Blog:
Right, so we understand the fail for this nonprofit. Jay, what was the fix?
Jay Malik, Tangicloud Technologies:
Okay, so in this case, the challenge was obviously that the implementation was already underway. As far as the customer's concerned, everything should work, that the recommendations have been made and then kind of the rubber hits the road and suddenly things are not working.
The challenge in this case, and actually several cases that we've had now, because it's very hard for Partners to find and select the right solutions, the challenge was that the customer is ready to go live, they're at the tail end of the implementation. So the fix was fortunately the Partner was able to find our solution, the Tangicloud Fundamentals App for Business Central for nonprofits.
And the challenge then was that we had to cost effectively implement our solution. So we worked with the Partner to protect the reputation and they preserved is customer budget. And literally within 30 to 40 hours we were able to take their setups as they'd been done in Business Central, activate Fundamentals, set up the funds and grants, turn on some additional features.
And from a customer Partner perspective, we are able to very cost effectively kind of rescue the project. We've done this in three or four now because it's a very common occurrence and gonna continue to grow. So the fix here was really to cost effectively help our Partner.
We are committed to helping Business Central Partners be successful and we do everything we can in our power to rapidly turn on features. And you know, we've been doing this for 27 years, so there's a lot of functionality built into the product over time and it's literally a matter of turning on features. And you know, everything's in the box and we just help our Partners be successful.
Anya Ciecierski, ERP Software Blog:
That sounds like exactly what they needed. What benefits did this nonprofit get from using Tangicloud Fundamentals?
Jay Malik, Tangicloud Technologies:
So the core functionality that people look for in a very vanilla sense is to balance funds. So oftentimes you can go find an ISV solution that is an intercompany solution that does due to due from entries. But for nonprofit accounting it's much deeper than you have to have funds, fund classes, fund types, grants. You have to have allocations.
So the key thing is we were able to turn on all these functionalities in the system and the customer is then able to provide detailed age receivable by fund reports to the auditors, as well as turn on a host of other features that we've been building in for nonprofits. We are very community oriented. We listen to customers and Partners. We're constantly adding features to the products.
So we tell the customers that you're never going to outgrow this functionality. So really we know it was really a matter of quickly turning on some features. And the benefits to the customer, they're able to satisfy some pretty stringent audit requirements to report by fund.
Anya Ciecierski, ERP Software Blog:
Jay, since you’ve been in this industry for decades, what advice would you give to nonprofits and government agencies to avoid this kind of fail?
Jay Malik, Tangicloud Technologies:
There's literally thousands of Dynamics GP customers who are gonna move to the cloud, hopefully with Business Central and Microsoft not to competing products. So really we have a message both for the customer as well as the Partner. For the customers I think the key thing is there are thousands of Dynamics, Business Central Partners across the world.
It's very important to select the Partners that actually work in your industry with nonprofit solutions, nonprofit customers or government customers. Because you know, this is the third largest industry in the United States, as an example. The nonprofit industry, it's huge. And the accounting for nonprofits and governments is different, and the language is different.
You call things different names. You call it organizations, not companies, you don't use the word profit. So for the customer, it's very important to select Partners that have actually worked in the industry. For the Partner, I think it's more critical that with the, as I said before, with the host of solutions that are available on AppSource, everything looks good. Everybody's words look good.
We've been doing this, as I said, for 27 years and, and we've been committed to this. And Business Central Online is very hard work. So as an ISV, we are dedicated to this industry. This is all we do. We're constantly adding functionality and our job is to help Partners be successful in serving the customers.
I think it's really dual message. One, cheaper is not always better. It's easy to go find an inexpensive solution, but the key thing is, it might solve what appears to be the problem on the surface, but that nonprofit is going have a whole host of other needs that they don't even know that necessarily are important to them. And we've got those all built into the product because we've been doing it for so long.
So our Partners, we can help you have a customer for life. And for the customer, it's a matter of turning on features and joining our community of nonprofits and governments. And we're always expanding the functionality of the software. And Microsoft obviously is always improving the technology as well.
So this is a future-proof solution for the customer and a pain reduction exercise for our Partners.
Anya Ciecierski, ERP Software Blog:
Thank you for sharing that story, Jay. It seems like any organization with fund accounting needs should be talking to Tangicloud first.
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By ERP Software Blog Writer, www.erpsoftwareblog.com